The system will be dedicated to energy systems integration, renewable energy research, and energy efficiency technologies at the NREL.
To be located at the under-construction Energy Systems Integration facility in Golden, Colorado, the $10m system will expand NREL’s modeling and simulation capabilities.
The system will have a computing capability of one million billion calculations per second (petascale) and according to NREL is the world’s largest computing capability dedicated to renewable energy and energy efficiency research.
NREL will use the heat emanated from the HPC as the primary heat source in the ESIF offices and lab space. NREL Director Dan Arvizu remarked that the system will provide the laboratory an edge to continue its groundbreaking research and analysis.
"In partnership with HP and Intel, NREL is acquiring one of the most energy efficient, high performance computer systems in the world for our research," said Arvizu.
The system will be deployed in two phases and will include HP ProLiant SL230s and SL250s Generation 8 (Gen8) servers based on eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors besides the next generation of servers featuring 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture based Intel
Xeon processors and Intel Many Integrated Core architecture based Intel Xeon Phi co-processors.
Intel high performance computing general manager Stephen Wheat added, "Our collaboration with HP and NREL is also bringing computer architecture and system cooling to accelerate innovation in more efficient use of energy critical for achieving exascale performance by end of the decade."
The first phase of the system installation is expected to commence in November 2012 and will reach its petascale capacity in the summer of 2013.
